In Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith
(when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent
improvisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have
directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the Gnostic monasteries.
Dante would have destined him, perhaps, for a fiery sepulcher; his name might
have augmented the catalogues of heresiarchs, between Satornibus and
Carpocrates; some fragment of his preaching, embellished with invective, might
have been preserved in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses or
might have perished when the firing of a monastic library consumed the last
example of the Syntagma. Instead, God assigned him to the twentieth
century, and to the university city of Lund. There, in 1904, he published the
first edition of Kristus och Judas; there, in 1909, his masterpiece Dem
hemlige Frälsaren appeared. (Of this last mentioned work there exists a
German version, Der heimliche Heiland, published in 1912 by Emil
Schering.)

Before undertaking an examination of the foregoing works, it is
necessary to repeat that Nils Runeberg, a member of the National Evangelical
Union, was deeply religious. In some salon in Paris, or even in Buenos Aires, a literary person might well rediscover Runeberg's theses; but these
arguments, presented in such a setting, would seem like frivolous and idle
exercises in irrelevance or blasphemy. To Runeberg they were the key with which
to decipher a central mystery of theology; they were a matter of meditation and
analysis, of historic and philologic controversy, of loftiness, of jubilation,
and of terror. They justified, and destroyed, his life. Whoever peruses this
essay should know that it states only Runeberg's conclusions, not his dialectic
or his proof. Someone may observe that no doubt the conclusion preceded the
"proofs". For who gives himself up to looking for proofs of something
he does not believe in or the predication of which he does not care about?

The first edition of Kristus och Judas bears the following
categorical epigraph, whose meaning, some years later, Nils Runeberg himself
would monstrously dilate:

Not one thing, but everything tradition attributes to Judas Iscariot
is false.

(De Quincey, 1857.)

Preceded in his speculation by some German thinker, De Quincey opined
that Judas had betrayed Jesus Christ in order to force him to declare his
divinity and thus set off a vast rebellion against the yoke of Rome; Runeberg
offers a metaphysical vindication. Skillfully, he begins by pointing out how
superfluous was the act of Judas. He observes (as did Robertson) that in order
to identify a master who daily preached in the synagogue and who performed
miracles before gatherings of thousands, the treachery of an apostle is not
necessary. This, nevertheless, occurred. To suppose an error in Scripture is
intolerable; no less intolerable is it to admit that there was a single
haphazard act in the most precious drama in the history of the world. Ergo, the
treachery of Judas was not accidental; it was a predestined deed which has its
mysterious place in the economy of the Redemption. Runeberg continues: The
Word, when It was made flesh, passed from ubiquity into space, from eternity
into history, from blessedness without limit to mutation and death; in order to
correspond to such a sacrifice it was necessary that a man, as representative
of all men, make a suitable sacrifice. Judas Iscariot was that man. Judas,
alone among the apostles, intuited the secret divinity and the terrible purpose
of Jesus. The Word had lowered Himself to be mortal; Judas, the disciple of the
Word, could lower himself to the role of informer (the worst transgression
dishonor abides), and welcome the fire which can not be extinguished. The lower
order is a mirror of the superior order, the forms of the earth correspond to
the forms of the heavens; the stains on the skin are a map of the incorruptible
constellations; Judas in some way reflects Jesus. Thus the thirty pieces of
silver and the kiss; thus deliberate self-destruction, in order to deserve
damnation all the more. In this manner did Nils Runeberg elucidate the enigma
of Judas.

The theologians of all the confessions refuted him. Lars Peter
Engström accused him of ignoring, or of confining to the past, the hypostatic
union of the Divine Trinity; Axel Borelius charged him with renewing the heresy
of the Docetists, who denied the humanity of Jesus; the sharp tongued bishop of
Lund denounced him for contradicting the third verse of chapter twenty-two of
the Gospel of St.

Luke.

These various anathemas influenced Runeberg, who partially rewrote
the disapproved book and modified his doctrine. He abandoned the terrain of
theology to his adversaries and postulated oblique arguments of a moral order.
He admitted that Jesus, "who could count on the considerable resources
which Omnipotence offers," did not need to make use of a man to redeem all
men. Later, he refuted those who affirm that we know nothing of the
inexplicable traitor; we know, he said, that he was one of the apostles, one of
those chosen to announce the Kingdom of Heaven, to cure the sick, to cleanse
the leprous, to resurrect the dead, and to cast out demons (Matthew 10:7-8;
Luke 9:1). A man whom the Redeemer has thus distinguished deserves from us the
best interpretations of his deeds. To impute his crime to cupidity (as some
have done, citing John 12:6) is to resign oneself to the most torpid motive
force. Nils Runeberg proposes an opposite moving force: an extravagant and even
limitless asceticism. The ascetic, for the greater glory of God, degrades and
mortifies the flesh; Judas did the same with the spirit. He renounced honor,
good, peace, the Kingdom of Heaven, as others, less heroically, renounced
pleasure.1 With a terrible lucidity he premeditated his offense.

In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in
murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendor.
Judas elected those offenses unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence
(John 12 :6) and informing. He labored with gigantic humility; he thought
himself unworthy to be good. Paul has written: Whoever glorifieth himself,
let him glorify himself in the Lord. (I Corinthians 1:31); Judas sought
Hell because the felicity of the Lord sufficed him. He thought that happiness,
like good, is a divine attribute and not to be usurped by men.2

Many have discovered post factum that in the justifiable beginnings
of Runeberg lies his extravagant end and that Dem hemlige Frälsaren is a mere
perversion or exacerbation of Kristus och Judas. Toward the end of 1907,
Runeberg finished and revised the manuscript text; almost two years passed
without his handing it to the printer. In October of 1909, the book appeared
with a prologue (tepid to the point of being enigmatic) by the Danish Hebraist
Erik Erfjord and bearing this perfidious epigraph: In the world he was, and
the world was made by him, and the world knew him not (John 1:10). The
general argument is not complex, even if the conclusion is monstrous. God,
argues Nils Runeberg, lowered himself to be a man for the redemption of the
human race; it is reasonable to assume that thesacrifice offered by him was perfect, not invalidated or attenuated
by any omission. To limit all that happened to the agony of one afternoon on
the cross is blasphemous.3 To affirm that he was a man and that he was
incapable of sin contains a contradiction; the attributes of impeccabilitas
and of humanitas are not compatible. Kemnitz admits that the Redeemer
could feel fatigue, cold, confusion, hunger and thirst; it is reasonable to
admit that he could also sin and be damned. The famous text "He will
sprout like a root in a dry soil; there is not good mien to him, nor beauty;
despised of men and the least of them; a man of sorrow, and experienced in
heartbreaks" (Isaiah 53:2-3) is for many people a forecast of the
Crucified in the hour of his death; for some (as for instance, Hans Lassen
Martensen), it is a refutation of the beauty which the vulgar consensus
attributes to Christ; for Runeberg, it is a precise prophecy, not of one
moment, but of all the atrocious future, in time and eternity, of the Word made
flesh. God became a man completely, a man to the point of infamy, a man to the
point of being reprehensible - all the way to the abyss. In order to save us,
He could have chosen any of the destinies which together weave the uncertain
web of history; He could have been Alexander, or Pythagoras, or Rurik, or
Jesus; He chose an infamous destiny: He was Judas.

In vain did the bookstores of Stockholm and Lund offer this
revelation. The incredulous considered it, a priori, an insipid and laborious
theological game; the theologians disdained it. Runeberg intuited from this
universal indifference an almost miraculous confirmation. God had commanded
this indifference; God did not wish His terrible secret propagated in the
world. Runeberg understood that the hour had not yet come. He sensed ancient
and divine curses converging upon him, he remembered Elijah and Moses, who
covered their faces on the mountain top so as not to see God; he remembered
Isaiah, who prostrated himself when his eyes saw That One whose glory fills the
earth; Saul who was blinded on the road to Damascus; the rabbi Simon ben Azai,
who saw Paradise and died; the famous soothsayer John of Viterbo, who went mad
when he was able to see the Trinity; the Midrashim, abominating the impious who
pronounce the Shem Hamephorash, the secret name of God. Wasn't he, perchance,
guilty of this dark crime? Might not this be the blasphemy against the Spirit,
the sin which will not be pardoned (Matthew 12:3)? Valerius Soranus died for
having revealed the occult name of Rome; what infinite punishment would be his
for having discovered and divulged the terrible name of God?

Intoxicated with insomnia and with vertiginous dialectic, Nils
Runeberg wandered through the streets of Malmö, praying aloud that he be given
the grace to share Hell with the Redeemer.

He died of the rupture of an aneurysm, the first day of March 1912.
The writers on heresy, the heresiologists, will no doubt remember him; he added
to the concept of the Son, which seemed exhausted, the complexities of calamity
and evil.

up1 Borelius mockingly interrogates: Why did he not renounce to
renounce? Why not renounce renouncing?

up2 Euclydes da Cunha, in a book ignored by Runeberg, notes
that for the heresiarch of Canudos, Antonio Conselheiro, virtue was "a
kind of impiety almost." An Argentine reader could recall analogous
passages in the work of Almafuerte. Runeberg published, in the symbolist sheet
Sju insegel, an assiduously descriptive poem, "The Secret Water": the
first stanzas narrate the events of one tumultuous day; the last, the finding
of a glacial pool; the poet suggests that the eternalness of this silent water
checks our useless violence, and in some way allows and absolves it. The poem
concludes in this way:

Christelige Dogmatik, refutes this passage. He writes that the
crucifying of God has not ceased, for anything which has happened once in time
is repeated ceaselessly through all eternity. Judas, now, continues to receive
the pieces of silver; he continues to hurl the pieces of silver in the temple;
he continues to knot the hangman's noose on the field of blood. (Erfjord, to
justify this affirmation, invokes the last chapter of the first volume of the
Vindication of Eternity, by Jaromir Hladlk.)

Translator unknown.

* From: "Artificios" (1944). In the introduction, Borges writes: "Schopenhauer, De Quincey, Mauthner, Shaw, Chesterton, León Bloy, form the heterogenic census of the authors I continually re-read. In the christological fantasy titled "Three Versions of Judas" I think I perceive the remote influence of the last [Bloy]."